BigShinyThing

First, a bit of background. Stay with us. It’s worth the trip.

In his magnum opus Being and Time, philosopher Martin Heidegger has a lot to say about tools. He argues that when we are actively engaged in performing a task through use of a tool, we lose consciouness of the tool itself, which, in his terminology, ‘withdraws’ into the task. The tool is only experienced as a thing-in-itself again when put down. Think of the experience of a skilled carpenter using a hammer, or a geek geeking in front of a computer. They’re not aware of the tool, they’re working at the task.

But something special happens with tools which are never put down — which, like the tool of language, are always on, always reliably available. Particularly when the task at hand isn’t something finite — such as making-a-chair, or building-a-house — but is, rather, the task of being-in-the-world. Consider the fishes of the sea:

The extraordinary efficiency of the fish as a swimming device is partly due, it now seems, to an evolved capacity to couple its swimming behaviors to the pools of external kinetic energy found as swirls, eddies and vortices in its watery environment. These vortices include both naturally occurring ones (e.g., where water hits a rock) and self-induced ones (created by well-timed tail flaps). The fish swims by building these externally occurring processes into the very heart of its locomotion routines. […]

Now consider a reliable feature of the human environment, such as the sea of words. This linguistic surround envelopes us from birth. Under such conditions, the plastic human brain will surely come to treat such structures as a reliable resource to be factored into the shaping of on-board cognitive routines.

Where the fish flaps its tail to set up the eddies and vortices it subsequently exploits, we intervene in multiple linguistic media, creating local structures and disturbances whose reliable presence drives our ongoing internal processes. Words and external symbols are thus paramount among the cognitive vortices which help constitute human thought.
[Andy Clarke & David Chalmer -- The Extended Mind ]

Or, as Clarke puts it elsewhere:

Our brains make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace.

In essence, our brains are good at using reliably-available [that caveat is important] features of our surroundings as part of what Clarke calls the ‘extended mind’:

…you say to someone you know, do you know the time, and they say yes. And then they look at their watch. You can sort of challenge them well, did you really know the time when you said yes? They’ll say “yeah, I knew how to get the time” and I think that’s often what we do mean when we say yes, we know things, [we actually mean that] we know how to get them from our long term memory, from some reliable environmental resource, from wherever.

[Andy Clarke -- interview]

To distill further — we’re good at experiencing having-accessible as knowing — with the tools (wristwatch, language, social media) themselves no longer even experienced as being outside ourselves. See where we’re going with this? With always-on social media, we have accessible not just encyclopedic (wikipedic?) knowledge of the world, but vortices of social networks and interrelations as fluid as the ones exploited by Clarke’s theory-fish. And we’re innately equipped to utilise those networks and interrelations as part of our ‘extended mind’.

This is [part of] the argument behind our claim that these media are post-communication: they’re enablers that sit beside (not within) the idea of communication, in our box of tools-for-being-people. If true, this is a huge and humbling thing to be a part of. If wrong, looking at emergent media — in particular social media — this way, at least pins it down for long enough to probe at concepts which are otherwise, well, slippery as a fish.

Your set text for this week, should you choose to accept this mission: Clarke’s Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again.

A few things we should set straight around here, just for the record. There seems to be some confusion in the back rows of the classroom about exactly what’s going on with all this social media/emergent media talk. So, boys at the back, stop picking your noses, and Smithson, I saw you scribbling banner ads at the top of your exercise book. Just stop it. Now.

Pay attention.

1. This is not a digital revolution. It’s social. Your Freeview box is digital. Your computer is digital. Everything else is people.
2. Second Life isn’t the start of something. Email was the start of it. Or the telegraph. Most likely, it started with the written word — Socrates was always suspicious that there was something big going on with this ‘writing’ thing. Your set text for this week is Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. You will be examined on this.
3. What started with the written word only hit its tipping point with email. Suddenly realtime, mutable. We’re still living in the shockwave of the social change this enables (we don’t get to choose the timescale of the histories in which we live).
4. Before that tipping point, we spent centuries wrestling with the idea of communication, a tricky, elusive thing. Realtime social media is about something else — it enables a different way of being, not [only] a new way of saying or representing. The kids get it, some of the rest of us get some of it:
   

   For sake of argument, we need a working model of the self. Let’s posit the one proposed by Clifford Geertz who described the Western concept of the person as a

   bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background.

   Wave goodbye. That was you before you bought a computer and signed up for an email account. Those were the good old days, when people could still complain about anomie, of being locked in the lonely confines of their selfhood…because they still had a selfhood, something relatively impermeable that kept the world out and the precious self in.

For the rest of this semester, we’re going to explore the idea of post-communication media. There will be more reading assigned, and some exercises. Do your homework.